Comment Re:Wha?? (Score 1) 511
No, wrong. A lot of gamers, like me, use Q3 benchmarks to roughyl measure how well a piece of hardware performs on games in general, not just on Q3.
I hope you meant that you use Q3 benchmarks as well as others, because if you don't plan on running Q3 you won't pay attention solely to Q3 benchmarks, and you definitly won't "use Q3 benchmarks to measure how a piece of hardware performs in general." Remember how Unreal ran really, really well on 3dfx cards, and on that one specific "benchmark" it would outperform competition that would spank it silly in every other performance assesment? Well, people didn't (or, people with any sense didn't) buy a Voodoo3/5 if their game of choice was Q3, because it obviously didn't perform as well then. True, you can't judge a video card's long-term (what, 6 months? :P) value, especially off of one benchmark. It seems that if one's buying decisions are so upset by a single benchmark, then one probably plans on extensively using the hardware for that one function (e.g. the voodoos for UT, or one of these cards for Q3). That, or one is just really gullible, and as I said before in this case should be greatly confused by all of the largely differing numbers that they put in big print on the boxes.
I agree that it is a shady practice, I just don't think that one single and moderately specalized benchmark should influence buying decisions so much. Thats like reading this article and deciding that because its so adept at performing one function that its great for anything. Perhaps its not exactly the same, but IMHO it is just as silly.
I hope you meant that you use Q3 benchmarks as well as others, because if you don't plan on running Q3 you won't pay attention solely to Q3 benchmarks, and you definitly won't "use Q3 benchmarks to measure how a piece of hardware performs in general." Remember how Unreal ran really, really well on 3dfx cards, and on that one specific "benchmark" it would outperform competition that would spank it silly in every other performance assesment? Well, people didn't (or, people with any sense didn't) buy a Voodoo3/5 if their game of choice was Q3, because it obviously didn't perform as well then. True, you can't judge a video card's long-term (what, 6 months?
I agree that it is a shady practice, I just don't think that one single and moderately specalized benchmark should influence buying decisions so much. Thats like reading this article and deciding that because its so adept at performing one function that its great for anything. Perhaps its not exactly the same, but IMHO it is just as silly.
